May Screening

“I open my eyes and I have an experience that I describe as a red tomato a meter away. As a result, I come to believe that in reality, there’s a red tomato a meter away. I then close my eyes, and my experience changes to a grey field, but is it still the case that in reality, there’s a red tomato a meter away? I think so, but could I be wrong? Could I be misinterpreting the nature of my perceptions?” (David Hoffman) Do we experience the real world, and could the content of perceptual experiences ever be misinterpreted? The filmmaker mistook a broken glass bottle for a log over a period of several weeks. Realising the interpretational error of her brain, she became aware that reality had been falsely depicted. It showed that perceptions may not be directly related to objects in the real world – whereas vision seems real, this may simply be a human illusion.

Antonia Luxem creates abstract videos, documentaries and paintings. Her documentary work explores current social and environmental issues, which are the focus of her debut film Perceptions on Chaos: Hackney, selected for the East End Film Festival 2017. Her most recent video work is an intimate investigation into human visual and temporal perception. Recently, Antonia co-founded ANTIKO, an online platform documenting the architecture of London’s East End through photography and video, as well as lastnightwolves, a virtual gallery which seeks to make sense of the everyday through written and visual mediums.